Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
in this scene, as well as their refusal to obey her commands, offers a commentary on the substitution of masculine for feminine voicings of power in the play. On the one hand, this episode occasions a significant dramatic moment for Joan, affording her a speech of some thirty lines; but on the other, it thematizes the evaporation of her dramatic effectiveness, since the demons as unwilling audience do not respond. And perhaps more importantly, the demons’ mere appearance on stage, their first, signifies that Joan’s power has been precipitated from an active, circulating linguistic and sexual energy into a gaggle of stagy fiends, whose dumb departure drives Joan to admit, “My ancient incantations are too weak” (5.3.27). Joan is still free to speak, of course, but her speech hereafter does not move her listeners. Her last exchange with York upon her capture by him both locates where her power has resided all along, in her tongue, and illustrates how this female verbal power will be increasingly circumscribed in the remaining plays of this first tetralogy.
York. Fell banning hag, enchantress, hold thy tongue!
Joan. I prithee, give me leave to curse awhile.
York. Curse, miscreant, when thou comest to the stake.
(5.3.42–44)
Although women can curse, and their bitter prophesies often as not come true, cursing hardly equals the planning, instigation, and control of dramatic action, as the women of Richard III will bear out. Joan’s last appearance, with her wildly dispatched and easily mocked attempts at saving herself from the flames, demonstrates even more strongly the extent to which female control in the play has dissipated. Her hastily composed excuses, far from ravishing her audience and substituting her will for theirs, are either ignored (“Ay, ay; away with her to execution!” [5.4.54]) or used to finish her off (“Strumpet, thy words condemn thy brat and thee” [5.4.84]).
The removal of both Joan and Talbot from the stage leaves the end of 1 Henry VI in an interesting vacuum of authority, one with which the final three plays of this tetralogy must contend, even as the persons represented in them contend for the crown. Although Talbot the hero is mourned, we are left nonetheless with the sense that his mode of epic action has been discarded as ultimately unsuited to the theater, even as this “great exemplar of chivalric masculinity,” as Coppélia Kahn describes him, is “no longer viable in this twilight of feudalism.”34 Both the chivalry for which Talbot is famous and the reportage that conveys that heroism become awkward and overblown in his last scene, whose strain is evident in its poetry, fifty lines of stilted, endstopped couplets. It is afterward too easy for Joan to point to Talbot’s corpse as only that, “Stinking and fly-blown,” fallen too far for the audience’s epic desires to project him as other than what the stage can present (4.7.76).
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